Canada’s battered and bruised national organic standard is still in limbo.
Votes on the fourth ballot are in and little has changed.
Eight of the 40 members on the Canadian General Standards Board’s organic committee are opposed to the main portion of the standard. That is one fewer nays than the last time a vote was held 11 months ago.
The organic agriculture standard has been under revision for three years, which is twice as long as it normally takes to update a document of this nature, according to the standards board.
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It has been a long and arduous process of failed vote followed by revisions to the standard followed by another failed vote, said Paddy Doherty, co-ordinator of the Canada Organic Initiative Project, an industry group desperately trying to get a standard and regulations in place to meet exporter demands.
“It is extremely bureaucratic. It goes in circles. That’s the problem with this process. There is no end. It just goes on and on,” said Doherty.
This time, instead of changing the standard to reflect ongoing concerns, the committee will respond to the negative comments by indicating the standard will not be changed any further, allowing it to move on to the Standards Council of Canada for final approval, he said.
That is at odds to what the standards board said will happen, which is more of the same process of attempting to resolve objections.
Laura Telford, executive director of Canadian Organic Growers, was not surprised the committee was unable to attain a better consensus after three years at the table.
“That’s just the nature of our industry. We are a bunch of very different people with very different interests.”
She said the organic sector ranges from small-scale farmers who see no need for a regulation, to big traders hoping to appease importers by developing a meaningful national label.
Plus there are regional diversities.
“It’s Canada. People in the Prairies think differently than people in Quebec or Ontario, so I’m not overly surprised we can’t get a vote where everyone says, ‘yes,’ ” said Telford.
Doherty said that is exactly the reason there hasn’t been meaningful progress on the standard. Seven of the eight negative ballots during this round of voting came from Quebec delegates.
“They don’t want to be on record agreeing to a voluntary standard,” he said.
Robert Beauchemin, chair of Table Filiere Biologique du Quebec, a provincial lobby group for organic agriculture, has been repeatedly assured the federal regulation being developed will turn the voluntary standard into a mandatory one.
He will reverse his vote as soon as Canada has a truly regulated system, but he said he won’t be influenced by a conceptual law that is a long way from implementation.
Beauchemin doesn’t know what form the regulation will take or whether it will survive the upcoming election. In the meantime there is only a voluntary standard that has no teeth and is difficult to amend.
“We end up with a bad standard for a hell of a long while,” he said.
Quebec groups want to see a tough mandatory standard such as the one that exists in their province. Since it was implemented in 2000, there has been tremendous growth in domestic and export sales of organic products.
Doherty expects the revised standard to be approved by the Standards Council of Canada despite the ongoing condemnation from Quebec because the committee has done everything it can to resolve the matter.
He would like to move the completed standard out of the hands of the standards board and into the control of a national organic body so it would be easier to occasionally amend the document.
But establishing that body has proven difficult. While Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia are well organized, the organic sector in other regions is splintered, making it difficult to determine membership requirements.
Beauchemin has been through that kind of organizational effort in Quebec and said it was incredibly difficult to get people speaking with one voice even on that scale.
“If you can’t get it together on a provincial setting, how do you think you’re going to get it together on a national level?”
